Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium
And Beckett’s Novel
Comment
C’est How It Is
One of the names that is often cited in respect to the
works of Samuel Beckett is the Marquis de Sade, both Jean- Michel Rabaté and
Danielle Casseli referenced Sade in connection with Beckett’s final attempt at
the novel Comment C’est ( 1961) at the first How It Is Symposium
organised by the theatre troupe Gare Saint Lazare Ireland at the
Centre Culurel Irlandais, Paris, 2nd February, 2018.
Yet, it would appear that to
refer only to Sade in relation to Beckett’s work is to leave out another very
important figure, and yet one who is so often neglected and yet who is
absolutely indispensable in the notion of power play which goes on in the celebrated
author’s work. The figure I am referring to is of course none other than
Leopold von Sacher- Masoch ( 1836- 1895). The Sado-Masochistic element in Comment
C’est, however, far from being a titillating novel of domination and
submission in the usual manner involving dungeons, latex and the inevitable
Saint Andrew’s cross, although funnily enough Beckett does make playful use of
the latter in the work rather, his novel invokes the philosophical ideas of
Friedrich Hegel as outlined in The Phenomenology of Mind ( 1807), the
discourse of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, involving the
hermaphroditic giants who attempt to overthrow throw the gods and so were
punished by being split in two by the gods ( Beckett makes great play of the
term scissiparity in his novel), and I shall also be obliged to refer to Gilles
Deleuze and his reading of Masoch in terms of the historical dimension.
Finally, Michel Foucault’s ideas on the fluidity of power will also have to be
invoked as well as Alan Badiou’s ideas on mathematics as ontology. As you can
see, power play in Beckett is a thoroughly exhausting game.
One of the most seminal discourses in contemporary
western philosophy is the what is often referred to as the Master & Servant
dialectic which features in Friedrich Hegel’s most celebrated text The
Phenomenology of Mind ( 1802). I remember being an undergraduate and my
professor at the time, who was German, and who was responsible for introducing
us to the works of Hegel in my final year had warned me that if I did not stop
reading Lacan she would fail me utterly. That was enough to get me to put the
great rehabilitator of Freud back on the shelf and to get engage properly with
the famous Hegelian dialtectic, and thank God that she did scare me into
reading this phenomenal thinker even if it were just to have me read this
singular text which had such a profound effect on Karl Marx ( 1818-1883) and so
is, in a sense, the bedrock of communism so much so that Stalin ( 1878-1953)
himself was to write his final dissertation on Hegel, all of which underscores
this current reading of Comment c’est How It Is ( 1961- 63) written by
Beckett over fifteen years after the second world war. Indeed, the ripple
effect of such a short text, five pages approximately, are simply astonishing
making it surely one of the most important texts in contemporary philosophy and
crucial to having a proper understanding of the following text. straight
So, in a nutshell, Hegel’s master and servant
dialectic is quite simple to grasp, really. This is its beauty. What it
proposes is that when two humans meet, Hegel is concerned with human
subjectivity from a phenomenological perspective – meaning he attempts to
render the human experience as objectively as he possibly can, confined as he
is to the straightjacket of his own human subjectivity which he believes can
only be breached by annihilating the ego. Looking objectively then at two human
subjects when they first encounter one another, Hegel proposes that immediately
there is a battle to the death ensuing, present day advocates of WOKE take
note, in terms of the will. We can see already the origins of Nietzsche famous
‘Will to Power’ doctrine here. And what immediately ensues, according to Hegel,
is battle ensues. If it helps to conjure an image of two intrepid warriors of
old, Achilles and Hector say, or in modern terms the Predator and the Alien!
But, you must understand that Hegel is really only interested in geist or
spirit, so these two analogies are really just symbolic. Fighting ensues
between the two agents and in time there is a victor and a vanquished. Here is
were it gets tricky, as there is a complicity between the two. Hegel describes
it as a kind of co-dependence on the two whereby the servant, or lesser of the
two, in an ironic twist is now somehow really the master as the actual master,
through the formers servitude becomes dependent on the servant for all of the
services that they provide that they are in turn rendered slavish in turn. It
is an ingenious discourse, and the origins of socialism can clearly be
apprehended in the core of its teaching.
Enter Aristophanes and Plato! So, one of the most
celebrated philosophical discourses in the western world is Plato’s Symposium
and in which Socrates and his companions are discussing the subject of love and
each gives their definition. But the one definition that is, without a doubt,
the most memorable, and I say this simply as it has since entered into common
discourse over the centuries and in many cultures and corresponding languages
traces of this discourse remain and are even used still to define love today,
which when you simply stop to think about that, for a minute, it really is
quite extraordinary. But then the tale that Aristophanes is extraordinary, as
when his turn comes to define love he talks about the tale that Homer first
spoke about in relation to Otys and Ephialtes who were the ‘primeval humans’
and who were hermaphroditic and so could self-replicate and thus multiply, and
they apparently did so in such numbers that they became wayward and decided to
take on the Gods in Olympus. Aristophanes paints this incredible image of these
round creatures, containing both aspects of man, so male and female conjoined,
who climbed up upon each others shoulders forming a ladder up into the sky so
that they were able to storm the heavens, which they did and so a war broke out
between these all powerful hermaphroditic giants and Zeus and his assembled
army of Gods.
When the battle finally was over and the Gods were
victorious, Zeus held council with the other Gods in order to decide about what
should happen to the rebellious giants who had tried to overturn them and this
is what Zeus decided to do in the end. He decided to split each giant in two
and hurl the male element far from the female so that the two halves would be
forever apart from one another and so, Love, according to Aristophanes is when
the two halves finally find one another again and they mate and they become
once more whole. This is Love according to Aristophanes. It is an extraordinary
account, but what makes it even more extraordinary is the fact how this myth
has entered into popular culture and language. For example, in English there is
a very common expression which both young and old people still use today in
Dublin and other English speaking cities and that is the phrase ‘my other
half’. And it is transgenerational, this is another extraordinary thing about
this phenomenon as it is not just old people who use the expression but middle
age people and young people do also, so this is living proof that this ancient
myth rings true to people and has done for generations and generations
throughout the ages of time. Of course, it is the task of writers to renew the
tale or tell it again just as Aristophanes retold it after Homer. Well, this is
one of the wonderful things that Samuel Beckett does in his novel Comment
c’est / How It Is.
One of the most immediate signs in the text is the
term scissiparity, it is actually used in the extraordinary collocation
‘latrinal scissiparious frenzy’,
which is but part of a lexicon of terms that are surgical in origin. For
example, ‘imbrication of the flesh’,
‘cleave’
and then phrases such as ‘bodies glued together’,
the text is full of such allusions to Aristophanes myth all of which I will
come back to, but before I do that I should like to present an entire fragment
from the text which will immediately situate us where we want to be. This
particular segment is extracted from part 2 of the book, with Pim.
heads
together necessarily my right shoulder overriding his left I’ve
the
upper everywhere but how together like two old jades harnessed
together
no but mine my head its face in the mud and his its right
cheek
in the mud his mouth against my ear our hairs tangled togeth-
er
impression that to separate us one would have to severe them good
so
much for the bodies the arms the hands the heads
So, here is what could be described as the first complete
frieze from Plato’s symposium illustrating and quite graphically Aristophanes
description of the primeval beings that were joined together as one whole and
who were later separated by Zeus as a punishment so that they could never come
together again and storm the heavens. Noticed the very clinic language Beckett
uses- ‘harnessed together’, ‘to separate us one would have to sever them good’ –
to severe, this is a very specific verb, and once again rather clinical. There
is something of the operating table in all of thisimbuing
the text with a gruesome realism which is rather reminiscent of the imagery of
Francis Bacon. Here
now is a description of the creatures that Aristophanes describes in Plato’s Symposium.
the
primeval humans were round, their backs
and
sides forming a circle, and they had four hands and
four
feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways,
set
on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two
sets
of genitals, and the remainder to correspond.
Again, a very graphic description which helps the
reader to visualise even more graphically these extraordinary creatures, and,
once again, this tallies very much with the extremely graphic descriptions that
Beckett uses of the couples in his modern retelling.
we
are one and all from the unthinkable first to the
no
less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh
without
breach or fissure
The almost forensic use of very scientific terminology
that Beckett employs matches in content the extremely rigorous reasoning of the
formal method of thinking, which Giles Deleuze was to single out so markedly as
such a distinctive element of his style and which he described as ‘a relentless
Spinozism’as
Beckett exhausts every possible variable in every context, and, this, for
Deleuze, is the most distinctive feature of Beckett’s style of writing. The way
he flips from ‘the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last’ in such a
reflexive and such a relentless manner is merely the rigorous application of a
forensic method, so it makes perfect sense to insert very elevated topic specific
vocabulary to formulate the very distinctive lexical sets which the substance
of Aristophanes myth, surgical incision, suggests. Indeed, the only difference,
really, between Plato’s text and Beckett’s is that Beckett simply multiplies
the vision further into a kind of nuclear process of atomisation creating a
very disturbing apocalyptic vision of humanity that makes Michelangelo’s vision
of Hell in the Sistine Chapel appear like a mere cartoon.
at
the instant Pim leaves me and goes towards the other Bem leaves
the
other and comes towards me I place myself at my point of view
migration
of slime- worms then or tailed latrinal scissiparous frenzy
days
of great gaiety
